The First Warm Day of Spring

Yesterday our weather went from cold and dreary to warm and sunny overnight! When I went outside at lunch and felt the sunshine for the first time in months, I knew I wanted to head back out as soon as work was done.

The minute I got home from work, we headed out for a walk around our neighbourhood. Please excuse the pale winter skin. We haven’t seen sunshine in about 5 months.

Even though we’ve lived here for almost 5 months, we really haven’t spent much time walking around our neighbourhood. Whiskey gets cold so quickly (and so do I) that we’d only been up and down a few streets near the apartment. Now that the weather is starting to get nicer, I can’t wait to begin exploring it.

As a lover of old houses, this area is right up my alley. I love all the architectural features and can just picture us relaxing on one of these front porches.

There is an abundance of red brick houses in our area, which is very different from the limestone buildings I loved in while I lived in Kingston.

And for the most part this seems to be the kind of neighbourhood where people take care of their homes.

The houses in this area all have their own unique architectural features like turrets. I love turrets, although I hear they’re a pain to decorate because of the curved walls. By the way, this house was huge. It didn’t look that way from the road, but it went really far back, with what looks like a newer addition near the back.

These two were loving the warm weather and I could barely keep up with them (especially when I stop every 3 houses to take a picture).

Whiskey was in full hunting mode, smelling everything he could and scoping out the trees for wayward squirrels.

I loved this house, with its black shutters, angled porch, white glass cabinets in the kitchen (you can peek in the window!) and this awesome little garage to the right.

One of my favourite houses in our area (which I make Garrett drive by sometimes) is this Gothic Revival with a beautiful mansard roof.

With the current state of neglect that it’s in, it reminds me of something straight out of The Addams Family. Very dark and creepy.

There are also some with more modern takes on the local architecture, combining grey brick with siding.

And some have even gone as far as to stucco the original brickwork, while playing up other architectural features like the peaks above the windows.

I can’t wait until it is even nicer outside and we can start exploring our area even more on our bikes. I was seriously starting to get cabin fever. Lets hope that the real Spring weather starts to arrive soon and stays!